On this day in 1215, King John of England placed his seal on the Magna Carta. He wasn't the first English king to grant a charter, but he was the first to have it forced on him by his barons.
John had two problems. One was that he was trying to defend what was left of the Angevin Empire, the land in France that had been the possession of William the Conqueror when he became conqueror, and Eleanor of Aquitane when she became queen. The Empire had always been in an iffy no man's land, though it had been holding on since William reasonably well. The central problem in the Empire was that William had been a vassal of France when he was just William of Normandy. So had Eleanor. So William and his successors were trying to maintain the position that they were vassals of France when they were in France, but kings fully equal to the French king when they were not. The French had been on a long campaign to restore logic and order to the world by kicking the English out. That's where this whole Hundred Years War, Henry V and Joan of Arc thing comes from. Through military and political incompetence, John managed to lose most of it, along with a substantial amount of income.
The other was that John's chief form of entertainment involved arbitrarily screwing over the nobility. He was rather like a medieval Donald Trump.
He had taxed the Church and the barons heavily to fund the Third Crusade, defend his holdings in Normandy, and pay for unsuccessful wars, and England was on the brink of civil war. The charter limited the monarchy's absolute power and paved the way for the formation of Parliament through the creation of a council of nobles with the power to enforce it by separating the king from his lands until he complied.
The Magna Carta is the nearest thing to a "Bill of Rights" that Britain has ever had, but it really isn't that close. It guaranteed, among other things, that "No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or deprived of his property, or outlawed, or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor shall we go against him or send against him, unless by legal judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land." But "free man" didn't apply to everybody. The only clauses that apply to serfs (out of 63 total) are clauses 16, 20 and 28. It is basically a bill of rights of the nobility.
Of course, John had no intention of upholding the document, and it was repealed almost immediately on the grounds that he gave his seal under duress. When the Pope got wind of it, he declared it "not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust" and excommunicated the rebels and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had mediated the negotiations. So the Magna Carta had lasted a total of three months.
Having nothing to lose, the First Baron's War erupted. The rebel barons concluded that peace with John was impossible, and turned to Philip II's son, the future Louis VIII of France, for help, offering him the English throne. Louis accepted under the existing French theory of England, namely that since William the Conqueror had been a vassal of France, that made England and everything in it part of France. The war soon settled into a stalemate. The King became ill and died on the night of 18 October 1216, leaving the nine-year-old Henry III as his heir.
Although the Charter of 1215 was a failure as a peace treaty, it was resurrected under the new government of the young Henry III as a way of drawing support away from the rebel faction. On his deathbed, King John appointed a council of thirteen executors to help Henry reclaim the kingdom, and requested that his son be placed into the guardianship of William Marshal, one of the most famous knights in England. William knighted the boy, and Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, the papal legate to England, then oversaw his coronation at Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October.
The young King inherited a difficult situation, with over half of England occupied by the rebels. He had substantial support though from Guala, who intended to win the civil war for Henry and punish the rebels. Guala set about strengthening the ties between England and the Papacy, starting with the coronation itself, during which Henry gave homage to the Papacy, recognizing the Pope as his feudal lord. Pope Honorius III declared that Henry was the Pope's vassal and ward, and that the legate had complete authority to protect Henry and his kingdom.
The war was not going well for the loyalists, but Prince Louis and the rebel barons were also finding it difficult to make further progress. John's death had defused some of the rebel concerns, and the royal castles were still holding out in the occupied parts of the country. Henry's government encouraged the rebel barons to come back to his cause in exchange for the return of their lands, and reissued a version of the 1215 Charter, albeit having first removed some of the clauses, including those unfavourable to the Papacy and clause 61, which had set up the council of barons. The move was not successful, and opposition to Henry's new government hardened.
In February 1217, Louis set sail for France to gather reinforcements. In his absence, arguments broke out between Louis' French and English followers, and Cardinal Guala declared that Henry's war against the rebels was the equivalent of a religious crusade. This declaration resulted in a series of defections from the rebel movement, and the tide of the conflict swung in Henry's favour. Louis returned at the end of April, but his northern forces were defeated by William Marshal at the Battle of Lincoln in May.
A great council was called in October and November to take stock of the post-war situation; this council is thought to have formulated and issued the Charter of 1217. The charter resembled that of 1216, although some additional clauses were added to protect the rights of the barons over their feudal subjects, and the restrictions on the Crown's ability to levy taxation were watered down. It was reissued in 1225, with the change that the king had agreed to it of his own free will and not under duress, as a means of getting money for the war in France to preserve the Angevin Empire. Remember the Angevin Empire?
In 1297, Edward I had angered the nobility by raising a new tax and they prepared to go to war against him. As a means of avoiding that and getting his tax, Edward reissued the charter yet again with an additional 17 articles to deal with the problem of enforcing it on the King. This is the version that remains part of British law to this day, though with most of its provisions repealed by later legislation. It became the basis for the British legal system and, in turn, the legal systems of most of the world's democracies. Parts of the United States Constitution were lifted directly from the Magna Carta, and it is so central to our own idea of law that the American Bar Association erected a monument at the meadow of Runnymede. The yew tree, under which the signing is believed to have taken place, still stands. It is at least 1400 years old and believed to be as old as 2500 years.
Comments
Post a Comment